If you wanted to catch Betty Honey you had to call by 7:30 in the morning, before she was out and about with her daily schedule. From exercise class to church activities to flower arranging, she led a busy and full life. Betty, who would have turned 90 next year, died peacefully on April 10.

Elizabeth Ann Honey was born in 1921 in Denver, Colo., the daughter of Henry Morgan Honey and Constance Daggett Lord. After her father’s death in 1924, Betty and her brother Bill moved back to the Vineyard with their mother to live in her grandparents’ house on William street in Vineyard Haven, attending Tisbury schools and graduating from the Tisbury High School. Throughout her life, her house and elegant gardens remained largely the same as when her mother lived there. Yet Betty was always engaged in the present, full of enthusiasm and curiosity.

Betty came from a family of strong women. Her mother, who attended Columbia University, was the first woman to run for selectman in Vineyard Haven. And she would tell with pride of how her great-grandmother saved one of the family homes, now the Martha’s Vineyard Savings Bank, during the Great Fire of 1883 by climbing out the attic window and onto the roof and spreading blankets, which she kept wet as the fire devastated the buildings on Main street. Through her efforts, the fire spread no further west.

Betty’s ability to recall meticulous detail about people and historical events was remarkable in its focus on sensory memory, particularly colors and textures and sounds. She told Linsey Lee in an oral history interview: “My first bathing suit was red, with a yellow wigwam embroidered on it.” She worked several summers at the Double Decker Restaurant located near the site of the old ferry terminal, recalling, “We wore pink printed dresses with white aprons and matching headband caps and saddle shoes, stockings and hairnets. We had to pay for and launder the uniforms ourselves.”

Throughout Betty’s life Grace Church was a center of activity, providing a supportive and close circle of friends. As a child, she sang in the choir, served in the altar guild, and taught Sunday school. In her teen years, the parish house hosted dances with rented jukeboxes. She loved to dance. “I was a great one for the jitterbug,” she said. In more recent years she served as chairman of the Flower Guild, directing and creating the flower arrangements on the altar for services. And she took special pride in the beautiful flower arrangements she created for many Vineyard weddings.

Betty’s gardens brought much joy to everyone who experienced their profusion of variety and fragrance, a true reflection of the gardener and her love of color and texture. For more than 75 years, she participated as a member of the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club, where she served as the special projects chairman. Her neighbor and fellow garden club member Wiet Bacheller said: “She was our eyes and ears for the club’s mission to beautify the Vineyard.” In her honor, the garden club has renamed their annual Presidential Award the Elizabeth A. Honey Award.

Betty was a bright and gracious lady, always beautifully dressed and coiffed. But she always had a mischievous glint accompanying this demeanor. With a wicked sense of humor and at times an acerbic wit, Betty always made you laugh. Even as a child that deviltry was evident. A bout of measles brought the doctor to her bedside with a regime of pills, “ . . . and I would be sitting up there like a queen in my illness, but I never took any of the pills. They were gone, mysteriously, at the proper time. My mother was very trusting of me; I was a good girl. I had a doll’s bureau, a very nice white painted one with drawers in it, and I’d put the pills into the drawers of the doll’s bureau. And 30 years later when I was looking around, I found that doll’s bureau, and the pills were still there. I got better anyhow.”

As a young woman, she loved to explore her neighborhood and venture up-Island with friends. “Fearless” was a word she used to describe herself. She had a keen interest in people, and enjoyed the company of people of all ages. One of her oldest friends, Ruthie Stiller, said: “We’ve been friends since second grade. She was so smart, the cleverest by far in the class. There were 12 girls in our class, all close friends. We would play house at recess time, draw a house in the dirt with a stick. We each were a person in this family, and this family was called the Crocodile Family. We’d draw Europe over here, China over there. But we didn’t go on a lot of trips. We were satisfied to be local. Betty had a wonderful imagination. Since she came back to the Island, we spent a lot of time together, we’d go to Neighborhood Convention meetings, to lunch, we’d go to all kinds of events.”

Betty recalled vividly the start of World War II: “We would listen to the radio; my mother would always sit in that rocking chair there and crochet and listen to the Philharmonic. And I’m standing there with a dish towel full of silver putting it away in that sideboard — which still holds silver, the same silver — when they had the big announcement about Pearl Harbor. It was a total shock to everybody.”

Betty was swept up in the war effort, training in first aid, serving as an air raid warden, and working with the school superintendent to handle rationing for the Island. She then worked with wounded soldiers and POWS at the dental department at Camp Edwards on the Cape for five years.

She recalled the lighter moments of her work during the war. “Shoes were rationed. We bought paper shoes. They were like sandals, very glamorous. We went to a lot of dances involved with the USO, so we had to be dressed up. We would wear our paper sandals, which had high heels made of cardboard. They didn’t last very long, but they didn’t require any kind of rationing. You could go to a dance and dance all night in them. If they got wet, that was the end of them. You had to be quite clever to manage.

“And no nylons. They had been invented, but it was a miraculous thing if you got a pair of nylons. If you did, you handled those with the greatest of care. Nylons were the thing, so if you couldn’t get them you would put this makeup on your legs in an orangey beige color. You would pour it out of a bottle, and you would do your legs every day. Elizabeth Arden made it. Then you took an eyebrow pencil and made a seam down the back and it looked like real stockings.”

In recent years, Betty was an engaging participant at gatherings of members of the Vineyard community telling of their wartime experiences. Her recollections about the war years are featured in the exhibit Those Who Serve — Martha’s Vineyard and World War II at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.

After the war, Betty moved to Boston and began a nearly 50-year administrative and accounting career with the surgical department at Massachusetts General Hospital. During that time, she attended the Church of the Advent and was active with the flower guild there. In retirement, she returned to her home on Martha’s Vineyard where she was a vital and much loved member of the community.

About being a lifelong single person, Betty said, “I had a number of marriage proposals, but I was always looking for something else, I don’t know what. I’m not bored with my own company. I never have been.” It is a certainty, however, that for her family and for her many friends, without Betty’s company life will be far less exciting.

Betty loved Halloween with the gaity and excitement of children in costume. Her house was always a gathering spot. This last Halloween she set up a table on the sidewalk and handed out candies well into the night until the last child came by.

She is survived by two nieces and several great-nieces and great-nephews.

She was predeceased by her nephew David William Honey and her brother Bill Honey, former president of the Martha’s Vineyard National Bank, who died in September 2009. Funeral services were held on April 17 at Grace Church.

Donations in her memory may be made to Grace Episcopal Church, P.O. Box 1197, Vineyard Haven MA 02568.